The potential for commercial promotion of products and services on the internet has created value in the form of advertising space on any web page that receives a significant number of visitors (known as “traffic” or “hits”). The primary source of traffic for all websites are links. These are graphic elements which are either lines of text (usually underlined and known as “text links”) which when clicked by the mouse load the target web page in the website browser window, or image elements (known as “buttons”) which act in the same way. As a form of advertising, buttons are comparable to display ads in more traditional publishing mediums, and are generally more desirable than text links because of their increased prominence.
Because of the limitation on the amount of page area available on a particular web page, there is premium on that space, based on size. A larger size graphic image, for which one standardized size is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high, is known as a “banner” and hosting websites generally place a high premium on them or severely limit their availability so as not to totally dominate the layout space of their pages. Some sites create subordinate “links” pages where such ads are essentially buried because relatively few visitors to their websites ever bother to visit these pages. The goal therefore is to get the maximum exposure in the screen area first visible on one of the initial web pages (known as “front pages”) that load when a particular website is visited, resulting in exposure to the maximum of that website's traffic.
Websites which receive a very high volume of traffic are often referred to as “portal” websites. One button placed on such a site is of great value because of the exposure it gets on that one page. However, conceivably the same impact might be achieved by placing the same button on many multiple less lower volume pages. It is therefore a desirable consideration for buttons to be compatible with any page where they may be placed and not to cause problems because of any code associated with them.
One method which has been used to force visitors to visit an advertiser web page is to spawn a new browser window (known as a “pop-up”) which then loads promotional web pages. That is a method which has fallen into great disrepute, as it has been used to create visitor traps which trigger an endless series of new windows. As fast as one can be closed additional windows are generated until either the visitor submits to proceeding along a predetermined path, or until the browser software itself overloads and crashes. Websites which rely on such techniques are now routinely banned from many web pages because of the complaints they create. Visitors to a web page cherish their power to determine for themselves what will appear on their computer screens by their own actions. They greatly dislike anything that requires extra effort to control, even if it means only a single click to close an unwanted function, or if there is any delay involved in moving on.
It is submitted that a new technique to increase one's visibility on a web page without demanding additional layout screen space would be of immense commercial value. The method described herein instructs one skilled in the art of programming how to create a graphic element which expands in size upon a mouseover event to a clickable array with one or more options, and then gracefully disappears when the mouse leaves that screen area (the “mouseout”), with a unique combination of features which are more fully described below. The net effect is to create new advertising space with commensurate tangible value which would not otherwise exist, increasing the chance of getting this exposure on the front page of another website.
The great challenge in widely deploying such a system is that one cannot always predetermine exactly what position one's submitted advertising button will appear on the website of another. Given full control over one's own web page programming, one skilled in the art may create graphics which expand into other graphics upon mouseover. But such systems generally require the website host programmer to predetermine in which relative direction the new graphic areas will appear in relation to the initial mouseover graphic depending on its placement. If one were to deploy a button that on mouseover always caused a new graphic to appear below it, that new graphic would appear off the computer screen if the button were positioned at the bottom edge of a page on a website to which it was submitted.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that different website browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.) and their many sub-versions require different code to achieve the same effect. This means one would have to execute different code on a viewing website browser depending on its sub-type, what is referred to as “cross-browser” compatibility. One of the most divergent areas of browser specific webcode is related to the sensing of the position of elements on a web page. To broadly implement a system as envisioned by this invention would require inventing a universal method of determining the position of a submitted button not only in relation to its initial visible position, but also to account for the shifts in position as a page was scrolled, and to modify the behavior of button accordingly.
For all the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a method for creating a drop in module of computer code, which can sense it's own position on any web page or subpage where it appears, and spawning on mouseover additional graphics outside of its initial boundaries, in such a way that the new graphics will always appear fully on screen, and where those new graphic areas may be sold as linkable space to advertisers, and submitted to multiple websites for maximum impact without compatibility concerns.
In doing all these things, the method of this invention represents an improvement over the methods in U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,734 (Gardner, et al.). Other forms of optimization are described by Gardner as to the choice of additional “panels” to display or their display time. But Gardner is limited in that it does not teach a method of optimizing the position of any new graphic elements to be displayed, regardless of their initial positional placement or the scrolling position of the page where the initial visual element is displayed. This is especially important where the initial graphic element is a small piece of text, where if it happened to be placed in a corner of the available display area it would require a method, as taught herein, of determining absolute screen position in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, to know on which diagonal to display any new associated graphic element.